Close Read: The Ship and the City

The U.S.S. New York, the ship with seven and a half tons of steel scavenged from the Twin Towers in its bow, paused in the Hudson near Ground Zero this morning and gave a twenty-one-gun salute. From the Times:

Those aboard were awakened at 4 a.m. on Monday, earlier than usual, with reveille whistles followed by the crackly sound of Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” over the loudspeaker.

That’s our kind of ship—especially since, according to the Times, the crew includes “a large number of New Yorkers who volunteered for the assignment.” Is it churlish, as a fellow New Yorker, to wish that there were more at Ground Zero to greet them? Eight years have passed since the September 11th attacks, and the Freedom Tower, as it may or may not be called, is barely above ground level. The site’s current state might be nice for tourists—they get a sense of walking among modern ruins—but it’s not so nice for anyone who lives downtown, or has tired of the romantic image of cranes spotlit against the night sky. The construction workers seem busy, so where is our tower? There is talk that it won’t be done until 2018.

There have been other U.S.S. New Yorks. The last one was built in 1911, and served in both World Wars. On April 14, 1945, it narrowly survived an attack by a pilot on suicidal mission, when it was grazed by a kamikaze. (One wonders if it stopped at Palau, where the battle of Peleliu was fought in the run-up to Okinawa and where six Uighurs, refugees from Guantánamo, arrived this weekend.) Three years later, that ship was sunk as target practice in the waters off of Pearl Harbor, like those subway cars they submerge to make artificial reefs. The new U.S.S. New York was built in Lousiana; for a time, after Katrina hit, workers were sleeping in trailers at the shipyard. It will be docked next to the Intrepid for a week, and people can go and see it.

Eight years have passed since the invasion of Afghanistan, and this is the sort of news we are supposed to be content with—from the Washington Post:

American, European and U.N. officials rushed to congratulate Karzai and pledged to work closely with his new administration.

They were congratulating Karzai because he had just been declared the winner in the Afghan presidential elections. There was supposed to be a second round because almost a million votes from the first round were thrown out because of blatant cheating, bringing Karzai’s total below fifty per cent. But over the weekend, the second-place finisher, Abdullah Abdullah, left the race—not principally, he said, because he thought he would lose but because he had every indication that the second round would be as fraudulent as the first. The odds are that he would have lost, but odds aren’t the smae as an election. (Steve Coll has more on Abdullah’s motives.) And yet, Administration officials told the Post that Karzai’s “acceptance of a runoff,” something required by the Afghan constitution,

was far more important in ensuring the legitimacy of the election process than Abdullah’s participation in it….

“This does not, in our view, affect the legitimacy of the process,” [an] official said. “It does present an opportunity to shift to a new phase in Afghanistan.”

The phase in which a candidate who ran a fraudulent campaign is congratulated? From the Times:

“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently—whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said.

Three to six months—the timing is awkward, as the Administration is expected to decide on a troop-level increase before then. What if we send our soldiers, and then find that Karzai hasn’t, in fact, done anything differently? He now has five years before he even has to pretend to face Afghan voters at the polls. Obama has three years.

Before the U.S.S. New York sailed up the Hudson, its captain visited Yankee Stadium, for a September 11th game. Maybe that’s what’s giving those Yankees their luck, though Alex Rodriguez told the umpire last night that he did consider being hit by pitches three times in the World Series a matter of chance. We’ll see what hits him, what he hits, and if the Yankees can close out the Series tonight. They’re leading three games to one.

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